In about half an hour, I’m meeting the man who has the job that should have, by all rights and measurements, been mine.  I was the better candidate for the position, not by a long shot, but clearly, nonetheless; I have more experience, higher qualifications, a better skill-set, a clearer vision for the role.  But he was hired because I am not two things that he is – a man and a Southern aristocrat.

Honestly, he is not to be blamed for that.  After all, it wasn’t his decision to hire himself!  And he can’t change his identity any more than I can.  So, despite the fury I still feel about the injustice that was perpetrated against me, I feel no anger towards him at all. 

But, I am anxious about this meeting nonetheless.  I am worried about the way in which my inherent, built-into-my-bones transparency about myself and my experiences, my natural instinct to confront truths – even and especially hard and unpleasant ones – and deal with them will reveal itself in this meeting.  I cannot be anything other than who and what I am, just like he can’t be anything other than who and what he is.  And I do not see how the situation in which we have been placed – by people and forces beyond our control – ends well.  How can this meeting end without hurt happening on one or (which seems most likely to me) both sides?

Last night, as I couldn’t sleep and my mind turned to this meeting, I remembered the moment of redemption when the death of my child in my womb paved a way forward for my father to face his own death with grace.  And I remembered, too, the story from the last chapters of Genesis that we read a few Sundays ago, when Joseph forgives the brothers who had sold him into slavery, into a life of exile and servitude, claiming to see the providence of God in what took place. 

And it occurred to me that God’s gift to us humans is that whatever messes we make, whatever tragedies and traumas unfold before us, due to our own sinfulness or the world’s brokenness, God finds a way to redeem them.  Always.

So that’s what Joseph understands in that moment of reconciliation with his brothers.  Not that “God had a plan all along,” which just feels too trite to me.  But rather that God takes the shitty hand we humans keep giving Her and insists on making something beautiful out of it.  Over and over.  Again and again.  We keep damning ourselves.  And God keeps taking our damnable actions and using them to save us.  It’s what happens to Joseph and his brothers.  It’s what happens on the cross. 

And when that revelation came to me in the depth of the night last night, it knocked the breath out of me.  It still does. 

And so, in a few minutes, I’ll get up and go to my meeting and I have no clue what will happen.  I am praying I don’t make a mess of it.  I am praying that it is the start of some kind of reconciliation, some kind of peace.  But, if it’s not, if he and I, in our human way, screw it up, that’s ok, too.  Because redemption is not our responsibility.  Thank God.